Quantitative patterns of stylistic influence in the evolution of literature

Hughes, James M.; Foti, Nicholas J.; Krakauer, David C.; Rockmore, Daniel N.

doi:10.1073/pnas.1115407109

Cited by 132 publications

(89 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…The K -L divergence is commonly used in studies related to ours [24,25]. Being a measure of relative entropy, it measures the divergence of two frequency distributions with regard to their informational content.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Universals versus historical contingencies in lexical evolution

Bochkarev

Solovyev

Wichmann

2014

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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The frequency with which we use different words changes all the time, and every so often, a new lexical item is invented or another one ceases to be used. Beyond a small sample of lexical items whose properties are well studied, little is known about the dynamics of lexical evolution. How do the lexical inventories of languages, viewed as entire systems, evolve? Is the rate of evolution of the lexicon contingent upon historical factors or is it driven by regularities, perhaps to do with universals of cognition and social interaction? We address these questions using the Google Books N-Gram Corpus as a source of data and relative entropy as a measure of changes in the frequency distributions of words. It turns out that there are both universals and historical contingencies at work. Across several languages, we observe similar rates of change, but only at timescales of at least around five decades. At shorter timescales, the rate of change is highly variable and differs between languages. Major societal transformations as well as catastrophic events such as wars lead to increased change in frequency distributions, whereas stability in society has a dampening effect on lexical evolution.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Universals versus historical contingencies in lexical evolution

Bochkarev

Solovyev

Wichmann

2014

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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“…These results suggest that later prose authors were influenced by the style of Caesar and the writers in Caesar's wake, including Livy, to a greater extent than has been previously acknowledged, even when writing about very different subject matter. Analogous phenomena have also been observed for the evolution of genres and literary style in English and other Latin corpora (7,10,25,40). Throughout our work, we show the usefulness of incorporating syntactic and metrical features in addition to diction, noncontent words, and punctuation marks, which have been considered previously by Jockers (10) and others (25), into such comparative analyses.…”

Section: Anomaly Detection Differentiates Suspected Citations From Othermentioning

confidence: 76%

“…Analogous phenomena have also been observed for the evolution of genres and literary style in English and other Latin corpora (7,10,25,40). Throughout our work, we show the usefulness of incorporating syntactic and metrical features in addition to diction, noncontent words, and punctuation marks, which have been considered previously by Jockers (10) and others (25), into such comparative analyses.…”

Section: Anomaly Detection Differentiates Suspected Citations From Othermentioning

confidence: 76%

“…Digitization of enormous corpora, such as Google Books and the Project Gutenberg Digital Library, has enabled "culturomic" analyses of global linguistic trends (21)(22)(23)(24). A notable recent application of such methods was a largescale study of stylistic influence in English literature based on use patterns of "content-free" words (25). Finally, quantitative stylometric analyses have long been used to clarify gross relationships between texts.…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

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Quantitative criticism of literary relationships

Dexter

Katz

Tripuraneni

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Authors often convey meaning by referring to or imitating prior works of literature, a process that creates complex networks of literary relationships ("intertextuality") and contributes to cultural evolution. In this paper, we use techniques from stylometry and machine learning to address subjective literary critical questions about Latin literature, a corpus marked by an extraordinary concentration of intertextuality. Our work, which we term "quantitative criticism," focuses on case studies involving two influential Roman authors, the playwright Seneca and the historian Livy. We find that four plays related to but distinct from Seneca's main writings are differentiated from the rest of the corpus by subtle but important stylistic features. We offer literary interpretations of the significance of these anomalies, providing quantitative data in support of hypotheses about the use of unusual formal features and the interplay between sound and meaning. The second part of the paper describes a machine-learning approach to the identification and analysis of citational material that Livy loosely appropriated from earlier sources. We extend our approach to map the stylistic topography of Latin prose, identifying the writings of Caesar and his near-contemporary Livy as an inflection point in the development of Latin prose style. In total, our results reflect the integration of computational and humanistic methods to investigate a diverse range of literary questions.authorship attribution | cultural evolution | intertextuality | machine learning | stylometry T he study of literature relies on mapping interactions between texts. Ancient Greek critics understood the tragedies of Aeschylus in part through their relation to Homeric epic, and ancient Roman commentators interpreted words and phrases in texts by citing parallels in other works. Much of literary criticism today rests on understanding these vast networks of intertextuality, which often have profound consequences for the meaning of both individual texts and larger groupings by genre or period (1). Through quantitative analysis of formal elements and their change over time, the study of intertextuality can shed light on the cultural evolution of literature (2).A central challenge in the study of intertextuality is its heterogeneous nature. Literary parallels differ widely in both similarity and scope (Fig. 1A). The relationship between the associated texts can range from obvious (direct quotation) to extremely subtle (artfully constructed indirect references, often referred to as allusions in literary study). Furthermore, parallels can operate on the level of individual words or phrases, short passages, or entire works and can involve verbal, syntactic, phonetic, or metrical features. As illustrated in Fig. 1A, intertexts can be of comparable similarity but very different scope; an adaptation of an entire work, for instance, can be thought of as a collection of many (local) allusions.In this paper, we focus on the quantitative characterization of intertextual rela...

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“…In addition to tracking human performance, use of the explicit semantic representation provided by Roget's provides categories fixed independently of corpus frequency. [Unsupervised methods, such as topic modeling via latent Dirichlet allocation (29), can provide a different and complementary window onto this process, including the study of both nonsemantic pattern (30) and unmarked semantic distinctions within indictment classes. ]…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The civilizing process in London’s Old Bailey

Klingenstein

Hitchcock

DeDeo

2014

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The jury trial is a critical point where the state and its citizens come together to define the limits of acceptable behavior. Here we present a large-scale quantitative analysis of trial transcripts from the Old Bailey that reveal a major transition in the nature of this defining moment. By coarse-graining the spoken word testimony into synonym sets and dividing the trials based on indictment, we demonstrate the emergence of semantically distinct violent and nonviolent trial genres. We show that although in the late 18th century the semantic content of trials for violent offenses is functionally indistinguishable from that for nonviolent ones, a longterm, secular trend drives the system toward increasingly clear distinctions between violent and nonviolent acts. We separate this process into the shifting patterns that drive it, determine the relative effects of bureaucratic change and broader cultural shifts, and identify the synonym sets most responsible for the eventual genre distinguishability. This work provides a new window onto the cultural and institutional changes that accompany the monopolization of violence by the state, described in qualitative historical analysis as the civilizing process. Part of a formal theory of cultural development designed to explain the emergence of the modern Western state, this civilizing process is taken to include a wide variety of forms of interpersonal relationships ranging from the rise of the concept of politeness to the relationships between classes. The core claim of the theory is that the state effectively monopolized the use of violence over the course of the 16th to 20th centuries, becoming an important actor in both the control of the cultures that encouraged violence, and in the direct policing and control of violence itself.The bureaucracies that characterize this shift undertook information gathering on an unprecedented scale, designed in part to inform later decision making, and the digitization of these records makes it newly possible to study the civilizing process in a quantitative fashion. The data here come from the detailed records of the Central Criminal Court, or Old Bailey, in London (11, 12). The Old Bailey has heard trials for serious crimes in London and the surrounding counties since the 16th century, and forms one of the longest-running bureaucracies in the modern Western world.We analyze the 112,485 trial records, encompassing more than 20 million (semantic) words of testimony recorded between 1760 and 1913, a period during which trial reports were at their most comprehensive. We focus on the lexical semantics of spoken testimony: the meaning-laden words used by speakers that can be grouped as synonyms at different thresholds of similarity. Our methods allow us to study the explicitly named semantic structures of these texts over more than 2 orders of magnitude in resolution, from the word-stem level (2.6 × 10 4 categories) to a synonym set level, with 1,040 categories, to a highly coarsegrained representation with only 116 categories.We report...

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Quantitative patterns of stylistic influence in the evolution of literature

Cited by 132 publications

References 21 publications

Universals versus historical contingencies in lexical evolution

Universals versus historical contingencies in lexical evolution

Quantitative criticism of literary relationships

The civilizing process in London’s Old Bailey

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